Goals can be the same as KPI. E.g. number of people completed registration, Pageviews, how "engaged" visitors are in terms of page/session etc.

Goal settings for convenience

For example we have two contact us form, retail/men.html and retail/women.html. For this particular shop, both forms' submissions are calculated together. By setting goals to count both men_thankyou.html and women_retail.html, there is no need to sum them up manually.

Once goals had been set, they can be re-used over other reports. Source/medium of particular goal to tell if adwords/Facebook provide better ROI, mobile usage of particular goal, landing page of goals to tell if which SEO keyword set should be focused on etc.

Goal settings for user journey

Settings goals valid to business can help reversing the user journey about particulat goals.